Empathy is not necessarily helpful

“Empathy is a distributed brain process” says the research team from the University of Colorado Boulder.

What does this mean? Empathy as an experience is not located in a specific region of the brain, rather it “utilises” the whole brain.

The researchers differentiate between empathic care – where empathy generates care and assistance and occurring in the part of our brain associated with value and reward; and empathic distress – where it triggers avoidance, fear and anger, and occurring in that part of our brain dealing with mirroring.

While there is little difference person to person as to the patterns for empathic care and empathic distress, what promotes the care element?